Good Old Saint ‘Nic-oletti’
Retired PBA member Don Nicoletti leads Santa’s Response Team
for another successful Bergen County PBA Toy Drive
n STORY AND PHOTOS BY AMBER RAMUNDO
It’s hard to explain the organized chaos that takes over
Closter Fire Department the week before Christmas. But, if
you can picture a Toys“R”Us on steroids, or an episode of
“Hoarding: Buried Alive,” with mounds of games and gad-
gets stacked to eye level, you get a pretty good idea of what
this gifting spectacular is like.
The more than 50 agencies that participate in the Bergen
County PBA Toy Drive each year can vouch that the image is
far from an exaggeration. After all, in order for Bergen Coun-
ty to manifest the holiday miracle each year, it requires a
warehouse maxed with toys and a militia of helping hands to
carry out the mission.
“I’m going to need everybody to step aside to make room
for this drop-off,” shouts Don Nicoletti, the founding father
of the Bergen County Toy Drive, as another truckload of do-
nations backs into the firehouse.
Even in a crowd of hundreds, with holiday music play-
ing and a disarray of boxes being tossed in every direction,
when Nicoletti speaks, everyone listens. An assembly line of
more than two dozen officers forms immediately outward
from the fire department garage. At the front of the line, two
men direct a large box truck until it reaches the human chain
waiting to unload.
On any other day, these men and women are community
officers, lieutenants, sergeants and dispatchers who work for
NJ State PBA Locals across northern New Jersey. But on Dec.
18, their individual roles and rankings mix to make one very
special unit that has become renowned as Santa’s Response
Team (SRT).
“I always say, a chain is only as strong as each link,” Ni-
coletti comments. “Well, we’ve got a very strong chain. It’s
incredible.”
As soon as the box truck opens, the SRT shifts into mo-
tion like flicking the switch on a generator in a power outage.
Games, play houses, action figures and dolls are quickly sent
on a journey, starting at the mouth of the truck and pass-
ing from one set of hands to another until tossed atop the
mountain of toys that grows rapidly inside the firehouse.
“It’s a team effort,” states Brian Considine from Hillsdale
Local 207, who brought his wife Linda along to see the toy
drive up close. “No one could do this by themselves. It’s great
to be able to work together.”
Inside the firehouse, beyond the great wall of toys, another
group of badged SRT members focuses on the complex and
chaotic task of sorting the inventory. Here in the fly zone,
toys are flung from one mound to another until landing in
the proper age/gender section. They will be loaded again
into the vans and SUVs of dozens of charitable organizations
CONTINUED ON PAGE 54
Don Nicoletti is the Saint “Nic” of the Bergen County PBA Toy Drive.
www.njcopsmagazine.com
■ JANUARY 2018 53